Michael Siva-Jothy

Michael 'Mike' Siva-Jothy is an entomologist in the UK, he is Professor of Entomology at the University of Sheffield.

Education and career Siva-Jothy was educated at University College London graduating with a BSc in 1981, he then did a PhD at the University of Oxford graduating in 1985.

Later, he looked at insect mating preferences in damselflies and found, using infra red cameras, that females prefer males with a higher body temperatures, which could then lead to eggs being laid in more favourable warmer habitats.

He has extensively worked on bed bugs and found that female bed bugs prepare themselves for mating, protecting themselves from sexually transmitted infections by producing lysozyme, a bacteria killing enzyme and by boosting their immune system. His team have also found that bed bugs will feed on human blood for 10 to 20 minutes, increasing their body weight by up to 200 percent. With an international team he discovered that bed bug species have been around for at least 115 million years and survived the extinction of the dinosaurs.

With an experiment on insects and humans Siva-Jothy found that the hairs on human bodies can enable us to feel parasites on us and slow down their movement so that they take longer to find a feeding site.

Honours and awards Siva-Jothy's image of a Scarce swallowtail butterfly and a Polistine wasp on a Scabius flower won first place in the Community, Population and Macroecology category of the 2013 BioMed Central's Ecology Image Competition.